Wednesday, August 29, 2012

- New Feature: Pause/Resume button in app - New Feature: "Green Felt" background! - Update: More velocity on dice when using 'reroll' button - Update: Can now be moved to SD card

This update takes into account a couple feedback items we've received since release, in particular including the ability to pause the simulation. This means if you need to show somebody your dice roll during a game, you don't have to be careful about tipping them over. :)

As a bonus, there's a new background that should be right at home in a casino!

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

This started out as a discussion, turned into tech development, and eventually became a very pretty and functional application for rolling dice! Dynamic Dice makes use of Bullet physics to properly simulate up to six simultaneous dice, all of which you can customize and tweak to your heart's content. It is primarily designed as an application, but it can be run as a live wallpaper as well and add some action to your home screen.

We play D&D regularly, and there's frequently a need to switch up the current set of dice you're using. The interface is specifically designed to allow quick swapping of dice, so it's easy to get what you need on-hand. You can simply push a button for a quick re-roll, or take things into your own hands by using your device's accelerometer to control things. The environmental settings even allow modifying the gravity of the simulation, size of the dice, and more.

There's a few similar products on the market right now, but I'm confident that what we have here is the best looking and quickest to use, and I'm hoping you folks agree.

This update primarily started out as a bug for the the cloud "internal lightning" not using the proper color, then went a little further once I discovered that per-cloud rain broke under some circumstances. You'll find that the light flash that accompanies a lightning strike generally feels better now, and this update also includes the scrolling fall-back as described below.

There are probably some other minor things mixed in here, but the main purpose of this update was to get Aquarium moved to the current version of our framework. It should gain a lot of stability improvements, along with the simulated scrolling on appropriate devices and some various performance benefits to boot.

No new artwork in this revision I'm afraid, unless you count rounding out the front of the submarine model. You can see the propeller better now too.

Friday, August 10, 2012

We got a few crash reports regarding using the thumbnail browser with huge numbers of files, and after some investigation we're pretty confident that issue's licked. So, if you've got a phone with two or three thousand pictures in a single folder, you should be taken care of now. :)

This update also includes a fix for the 'image options' popup -- generally this would occur if you removed an image from the list, then immediately double-tapped and removed it again.

Sorry about this folks. We accidentally used an RGB framebuffer instead of RGBA. Only RGBA is universally supported, so a few devices were showing a black screen when they had time of day enabled. This version should be better behaved.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

- Update: Now using OpenGL 2.0 - New Feature: Different visual themes - New Feature: Simulated scrolling on some devices

This started out as a maintenance update to bring Silhouette forward to our current framework, then expanded a notch to add some more, well, silhouettes to it. As a result we've now got a basic framework in place for adding new foreground elements, and have included a field of windmills and a cityscape to begin with. Hopefully folks dig them!

We also are including the simulated scrolling that we put in place for Koi Pond earlier, since it doesn't appear to have caused any problems. :)

Saturday, August 4, 2012

- Update: Two new backgrounds! - Update: Simulated scrolling on some devices
This update also should include some minor bug fixes and improvements, but the main things are the two items up above. The new backgrounds are courtesy of Kim Lathrop, one is an abstract and one is a beautiful backdrop of heartstones on sand. :)

The simulated scrolling is something we're putting in place as a general case, so should be available in most of our products as they get updated going forward. Basically, a lot of companies disable wallpaper scrolling on their home screens, and we get a lot of complaints about this. It's not our fault but that's not how people read it.

So, we think we've worked out a reasonable way to detect this behavior, and are simulating the camera movement based on drag events. It's not perfect but should mean you get to see the entire backdrop and it generally behaves sensibly in testing. Hopefully folks consider it an improvement!